


if you didn't put milk in your tea

by JeanSouth



Category: Free!
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-14
Updated: 2015-04-14
Packaged: 2018-03-22 20:23:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 803
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3742450
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JeanSouth/pseuds/JeanSouth
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Please, just open your damn eyes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	if you didn't put milk in your tea

“So,” Sousuke says over lunch, idly digging out the last of the sauce from a sad-looking tub of ketchup. “What’s his name?”

Rin, diagonal from him, hovering protectively over a cardboard tub of chicken nuggets, catches the tone of his voice. A slight underlay of peeved, a larger portion of jealous. Haru doesn’t notice, but then, they haven’t been best friends since, well, forever. Forever’s a pretty long time to know a guy without getting a feel or two for his moods. He watches Haru drink water in a long, head-tilted-back swig, baring his neck unwittingly. He’s lucky, Rin thinks, tempting a man like that.

“Tomohiro,” Haru offers, and not much else. Perhaps he’s shrewder than Rin gave him credit for.

-  


“I could have loved him,” Sousuke brings up later, in the middle of a conversation about whether or not birds can sneeze. “If he wasn’t so into water. But he works in an aquarium, and I really don’t like crowds.”

“Uh-huh,” Rin nods, and brings up a Google search instead.

“It’s just, the whole, you know, the whole…” Sousuke brings up about half an hour later, tension gathering in his shoulders as he hunches them, a clearer sign of his stressed out mind than a simple frown.

“The…?” Rin prompts. He gets a head-shake back, and at least ten minutes of blessed silence that don’t revolve around Haru, and his new, strikingly handsome boyfriend, who goes to college, and can drive, and don’t even get him started on the pool in his uncle’s back yard.

“The way he hates coffee. He does this nose-scrunchy thing, which is sort of cute, makes a little wrinkle between his eyebrows and he kind of pouts-” Sousuke stops himself, visibly getting back on track. “I could never deal with someone who hates coffee. He’d probably complain about it in the mornings and it’d be unbearable.”

Satisfied with himself, he nods, and lays back down. 

“Right,” Rin agrees, sort of (but not really), and changes the subject. “More Bayonetta?”

-

“How is he?” 

Haru has noted the rather odd, intense focus Sousuke has for his boyfriend, lately. He’s ever so handsome, but above that, he’s understanding. Pleasantly content to see Haru working in an aquarium, where he likes it, or to pick him up from the pool hours later, or his relatively bland diet. He gets the whole defying what the world wants you to do kind of thing. Haru wouldn’t say they were based so much on passion as on a mutual understanding, on-going support, and a domestic peace.

“Quite well,” Haru flips open his phone to check the time. “You could meet him if you like, he’ll be here soon.”

The muscle in Sousuke’s jaw tightens oddly.

-

“If he’d just had better taste in men,” Sousuke starts his rant. Rin sometimes wonders if Sousuke even bitches as much to his parents as he does private, one on one between them.

“Then you could have loved him,” Rin rolls his eyes. “Yes, I know. If he didn’t do something that you actually really like about him, then you could have loved him.”

Vaguely, Rin wishes he hadn’t had his drama phase in high school, since now he’s stuck fixing everyone else’s as the ultimate, horrible karma.

“That’s not true,” Sousuke crosses his arms, looking bigger than he is (despite the fact that he is, already, very large).

“Is too,” Rin battles back, feeling oddly like he’s 7 again and fighting over Sousuke being a big dumb-head. “So all the things you don’t like about Haru are… how much he likes water? How he cooks all the time? The way he seems to get you even when you stop talking midway? No, wait, what you don’t like about him is that he doesn’t like coffee, or that the men he likes suck, or god forbid, the chime of his doorbell. What’s left of Haru if you take away all that, huh? Nothing. If Haru wasn’t aaaaaall those things, you wouldn’t have to grow up and face your feelings!”

Somehow, he feels kind of liberated, even as Sousuke’s face drops.

“You’re right,” Sousuke concedes, then turns, then walks out the door. Shit.

-

Haru opens the door, and it rains. Sousuke’s hair drips water, like he’s come from a pool: Poseidon given flesh as his t-shirt sticks to him.

“I like how you choose your own path.” Sousuke grabs Haru’s upper arms, steps closer, and the lighting flashes behind him like it’s coming from the stormy look in his eyes. “I like how you hate coffee. I like how you bask in the sun. I like how you put your mind to things. I like– I like you.”

The thunder finally catches up and cracks as he leans in, steal a kiss, then steal more.

So that’s how passion feels.


End file.
